A Letter to Huysmans, Secretary of the International Socialist Bureau[1]

Written:Written late in March 1912Published:Printed on April 12, 1912 in circular No. 7 of the International Socialist Bureau.

      Translated from the French.

      Signed:N. Lenin.

      Published according to the circular text.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,[1974],

      Moscow,Volume 17,

      pages547-550.Translated:Dora CoxTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2004).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

DearComrade,

Inconnection with the resolution adopted by a number of groups abroad
and also by the editors of two periodicals published abroad, who claim to
belong to the R.S.D.L.P., I, as representative of the Central Committee of
the R.S.D.L.P., state the following:

(1)Whilefor several years it was impossible to convene a conference
of the Russian organisations, or to form a Central Committee, or revive the
previously elected Central Committee which might have united those
organisations, the recently held Party Conference succeeded in bringing
together twenty-three Party organisations active in Russia.

Allthe reports on this Conference, already delivered to most of the
Russian Party organisations, were received with warm sympathy everywhere,
and all these organisations declared that they would support the Central
Committee elected by the Conference. In the issue ofRabochaya
Gazeta(organ of the Central Committee of the Party) of March 30,
1912, we were already able to publish a number of resolutions adopted by
the organisations in St. Petersburg (Vasilyevsky Ostrov District), Moscow,
Kiev, Samara and Nikolayev expressing warm sympathy with the Conference and
promising to support it and the Central Committee. (Since the publication
of that issue, we have received a similar resolution from Tiflis.) Thus we
cannot attach the least significance to the protests of small groups abroad
which are not backed by any Party organisations in Russia.

(2)TheConference of Party members active in Russia, which has aroused
the protest of all the small groups abroad,dealt especially with the disorganising activities of the groups abroad and
with the disrupting effect which these groups often have upon the Party
work in Russia. These groups, which are not connected with any organisation
functioning in Russia, taking advantage of the fact that they are not
responsible to anybody, permit themselves to speak in the name of the
Party. This malady, which has gnawed at our Party for a long time, is a
result of Russia’s political regime, which, on the one hand, condemns our
Party to an underground existence and, on the other, compels a great number
of Party functionaries to live abroad in exile.

TheConference severely condemned the disorganising activities of these
groups, all of them existing abroad and absolutely irresponsible. As far as
the Party is concerned, there is nothing unexpected in the attacks by which
these groups are trying to discredit the Conference that condemned their
conduct.

(3)Amongthose who signed the resolution we see theGolos
Sotsial-Demokratagroup. This signature speaks volumes, for it
explains the true meaning of the hostile campaign launched against the
Conference by the liquidationist press, as well as by the bourgeois press,
in Russia, and even by some foreign newspapers.

Thepoint is that in its resolution summarising the results of the
fight among the various trends in our Party in the past four years, the
Conference came out emphatically against the trend represented byGolos
Sotsial-Demokrata. In order that you may be quite clear on this
question, I consider it worth while to quote the resolution in question.

Hereit is in full.

“(1)TheRussian Social-Democratic Labour Party for nearly four years
has been waging a determined fight against the liquidationist trend, which
was characterised at the conference of the Party in December 1908 as

“‘anattempt on the part of a group of Party intellectuals
to liquidate the existing organisation of the R.S.D.L.P. and to replace it
at all costs, even at the price of downright renunciation of the programme,
tactics, and traditions of the Party, by a loose association functioning
legally’;

“(2)ThePlenary Meeting of the Central Committee held in
January 1910, continuing the fight against this trend, unanimously declared
it to be a manifestation of bourgeois influence upon the proletariat and
demanded; as a condition for real Party unity and for the fusion of the
former Bolshevik and Menshevik groups, a complete rupture with
liquidationism and the utter rout of this bourgeois deviation from
socialism;

“(3)Inspite of all Party decisions and in spite of the obligation
assumed by the representatives of all the factions at the Plenary Meeting
held in January 1910, a section of Social-Democrats, grouped around the
magazinesNasha ZaryaandDyelo Zhizni, began to defend
openly the trend which the entire Party has recognised as being the product
of bourgeois influence on the proletariat;

“(4)Theformer members of the Central Committee—M–l, Yuri, and
Roman, refused not only to join the Central Committee in the spring of
1910, but even to attend a single meeting to co-opt new members, and
bluntly declared that they considered the very existence of the Party
Central Committee to be ‘harmful’;

“(5)Itwas precisely after the Plenary Meeting of 1910 that the
above-mentioned chief publications of the liquidators,Nasha ZaryaandDyelo Zhizni, definitely turned to liquidationism all along
the line, not only ‘belittling [contrary to the decision of the Plenary
Meeting] the importance of the illegal Party’, but openly renouncing it,
declaring that the Party was ‘extinct’, that the Party was already
liquidated, that the idea of reviving the illegal Party was ‘a reactionary
utopia’, using the columns of legally published magazines to heap slander
and abuse on the illegal Party, calling upon the workers to regard the
nuclei of the Party and its hierarchy as ‘dead’, etc.;

“(6)Ata time when throughout Russia the members of the Party,
irrespective of factions, united to promote the immediate task of convening
a Party conference, the liquidators, banded together in entirely
independent small groups, split away from local Party organisations even in
those places where the pro-Party Mensheviks Predominated (in Ekaterinoslav,
Kiev) and finally renounced all Party connections with the local
R.S.D.L.P. organisations;

“TheConference declares that by its conduct theNasha ZaryaandDyelo Zhiznigroup hasdefinitely placed itself outside
the Party.

“TheConference calls upon all Party members, irrespective of
tendencies and shades of opinion, to combat liquidationism, explain its
great harmfulness to the cause of the emancipation of the working class,
and bend all their efforts to revive and strengthen the illegal Russian
Social-Democratic Labour Party.”

(4)Inview of all this, it is quite obvious that it is not a question
of “usurpation”, or a “split”, etc., and that this is not the cause of
the liquidators’ anger. The Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. declared against
the trend which in practice had long kept aloof from every kind of Party
work, which had done its utmost to prevent the re-establishment of the
Central Committee and had turned the last remaining Party institution (the
Central Committee Bureau Abroad) into “a weapon in the hands of gentlemen
who strove to liquidate the Party” (the words of Comrade Plekhanov, who is
not a supporter of the Conference).

(5)Asregards Social-Democratic organisations of the national
minorities, I must put it on record that the R.S.D.L.P. existed as the
R.S.D.L.P. up to 1906 (or, more correctly, up to 1907), before the national
minority organisations joined our Party (the Bund withdrew from the Party
in 1903 and remained outside it until 1906, or, rather, 1907). Hence, in
view of their absence from the Conference, it is the duty of the Central
Committee to start negotiations with these organisations for the purpose of
resuming normal relations with them.

[1]Lenin’sletter was sent to all socialist parties on April 12 (N. S.),
1912 by the International Socialist Bureau with a request that it be
published in their press.